In Mark 3:31-35, the gospel writer could not have provided a more dramatic setting for a scene in the ministry of Jesus in which the Son of Man stood conventional wisdom on its head regarding family relationships and what he viewed as true kinship.
Our Lord was among the home folks in Capernaum, teaching and healing and calling out his 12 apostles. And the people of this Galilean town and the surrounding area were following Jesus, crowding around him wherever he went, eager to hear and to see what “Joe’s boy” would do or say next. They gave him no respite from the rigors of a ministry that already was taxing on the energies of Jesus.
For understandable reasons, his family was worried about him. “Jesus just isn’t himself these days,” I can hear them saying. “Maybe all the excitement and the strain of his teaching and preaching and healing are just too much for him.” As Mark tells it, the family of Jesus had gathered outside a house in which they had been told Jesus was teaching. It was a touching picture – a concerned mother and her other sons crowded out, believing that Jesus was inside and beside himself, and wanting to take him home.
A message came to Jesus that his mother and siblings were outside and, as one translator put it so aptly, “wanted a word with him.”
The people gathered around Jesus – and certainly his family waiting anxiously and expectantly outside – were not prepared for the answer he gave. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked, and then gave an unexpected and what many may have considered an insensitive answer. He looked around the room and declared, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
It was not the purpose of Jesus to negate the concept of family that had shaped his own life and which mattered greatly to other Hebrew people. He did, however, redefine it. He held fast to an image of kinship characterized by loyalty, by caring and by nurturing, but he gave to this image a far deeper and much broader meaning. Obedience to God rather than blood relationship would be the hallmark of this new family that Jesus had in mind. If blood is thicker than water, as the saying goes, then Jesus declared for all time that obedience is thicker than blood.
The spiritual family of God that Jesus envisioned is expressed in the Christian church, where all who profess Jesus as Lord are embraced, loved, cared for, nurtured, and guided toward conformity to their elder brother, Jesus Christ. It is in church that we learn and experience spiritual kinship as God our father and Christ our brother intended it. The church is home for all who desire with all of their being to make God’s will their will, where it is affirmed that obedience really is thicker than blood.